Insight 17: What Makes Waste Legible?

One of the things that surprised me most during Fragile Futures was that people actually read the education panel, an A4 framed text about the exhibition.

At both Meeniyan Art Gallery and Yarra Sculpture Gallery, it was a modest panel on the wall, with a font I worried was too small. Yet visitors stopped and read it, carefully. More importantly, I watched some of them turn back towards the artworks afterwards. They looked again, now knowing that the strange material appearing throughout the exhibition was actually waste from resin 3D printing.

The material had been visible all along. What changed was that it became legible.

Most visitors don’t know what resin 3D-printing waste looked like. Their limited familiarity with 3D printing usually came from seeing filament printers on television or social media. With both resin and filament printing, temporary supports are created during the process and then removed after an object has been made, leaving intricate branching structures that can resemble scaffolding, roots, coral or some unfamiliar industrial organism.

Pic above: Prototype of Material Pathways using waste overtly.

Philosopher Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter helps explain why the material could exert a presence before it was recognised. For Bennett, matter is not simply a passive carrier for an artist’s idea … its form, texture and behaviour participate in the encounter. The resin supports can appear organic, brittle, excessive, beautiful or threatening without any explanation from me.

Unless someone understands the printing process, there is no reason for them to identify those branch structures as waste.

My observations add a practical qualification: 

Material agency is not the same as material legibility.

The waste could generate curiosity, attraction or unease without communicating what it was (agency). Recognising its origin as 3D-print waste (legibility) often appeared to trigger another level of engagement. Visitors returned to artworks, examined their surfaces more closely and began connecting their material construction with their ecological meaning … ‘ahhhh plastic waste, printing waste!’.

The result was rich feedback about the exhibition presenting ‘uncomfortable truths’, ‘doom’ and generated important conversations frequently once the waste was understood.

Waste legibility was not located entirely within the material. It was assembled around it.

Artwork labels, the education panel, exhibition sequencing, artist talks, conversations, exhibition brochures, advertising text and social media …. all added to the combination along with waste material and artwork forms presented. 

I had previously thought about these as separate aspects of making and presenting the exhibition. I now see them as connected waste-legibility mechanisms.

Research into museum labels describes the motion of visitors moving from artwork to text and then back to the artwork. That was precisely what I observed at Meeniyan and Yarra. The text did not necessarily replace looking or complete the interpretation. It changed what became available when people looked again.

Clarity came with a trade-off.

The artworks themselves generated some immediate trade-offs.

The unaltered printing supports retained direct evidence of 3D-printing fabrication but often failed to look like waste at all. Yet grinding the same material for Microplastics made it resemble debris like moon dust or ecological fallout, so it became more readily legible as waste while becoming less identifiable as the residue of the 3D-printing production process.

That degree of legible resolution created another tension.

In Self-made Relics, the relationship between the figures and the waste of their own production was clear, and visitors responded strongly. When the residue was embedded more cryptically within works such as Taxonomies of Absence or After the Species: Totems, visitors had greater interpretive room but might never recognise the material’s origin.

Different mechanisms preserved different kinds of knowledge.

This was not simply a choice between being didactic and being obscure, one retained evidence of fabrication, another made excess immediately recognisable. Another created an ecological association, and a label or education panel could connect these readings, while a conversation could respond to whatever a particular visitor had noticed or misunderstood.

The Waste Engine (a discarded 3D-printer with waste accumulation) provided a more direct encounter by bringing failed prints, supports and discarded fragments together as an accumulation. The few visitors I observed were intrigued, handling and closely examining the material.  These early encounters indicated its potential, but it requires more exhibition time before I can determine how effectively it changes interpretations of the exhibition.

I won’t be ranking these mechanisms, and perhaps a single ranking would be unhelpful; they are not all trying to achieve the same thing. One might preserve material specificity, another support immediate recognition, and another allow delayed discovery. Their value depends on what I want the waste to communicate within a particular artwork.

What I can do is begin testing them more consciously. My newer Taxonomies, in which the supports are reorganised into cryptic reef-like formations, will provide the next material test.

I thought I was testing how people responded to 3D-printing waste. I am now also testing how they come to know that they are looking at waste at all.

I am only scratching the surface.

Related Insight 13: When Waste Stops Looking Like Waste - an earlier material experiment that first raised the question of what becomes clearer, and what is lost, when waste changes form.

List of current Waste-Legibility Mechanisms